I'm Your Man (62 page)

For now, the old smoothie packed his good suit and left for a short promotional tour—New York, Paris, London. There were countless requests for interviews, which he turned down, having appeared to have entirely lost interest in the interview process. Perhaps he had never had much interest in the first place, but he had been happy (or courteous enough, or curious enough) to participate in the game and proffer exquisitely structured, perfectly worded bons mots. Instead he held a few press conferences—theatrical affairs, with a handpicked media audience. He played his album, then invited a few questions. A master of deflection, with great charm he parried almost every one. He recycled old lines and gags into new column inch upon column inch in major publications. “How is it for you to listen to your own records?” asked Jarvis Cocker, the Britpop star who moderated the London event. “I wasn't listening,” Leonard replied. Cocker asked him how he felt about his latest award. PEN New England, an American literary association whose jury included Bono, Elvis Costello, Rosanne Cash and Salman Rushdie, had named Leonard Cohen and Chuck Berry as joint winners of their inaugural prize for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence. Leonard replied, “The thing I liked about this award was that I'm sharing it with Chuck Berry. ‘Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news': I'd like to write a line like that.”
19

At the press conference in Paris (which Leonard's old lover Dominique Issermann attended), when someone asked him about death he answered, in a perfect imitation of solemnity, “I have come to the conclusion, reluctantly, that I am going to die.” As to the follow-up question, of what he would like to be in his next life, Leonard the Jew answered, “I don't really understand that process called reincarnation,” while Leonard the Buddhist monk said without hesitation, “I would like to come back as my daughter's dog.”
20

B
ack in Los Angeles, Lorca's dog was at the vet's and Leonard was heading back from the doctor's. He had just taken Roshi for his checkup. Leonard had returned, at least part-time, to his old job of driving Roshi around, running errands and taking him food; Roshi had become quite fond of Leonard's chicken soup. Roshi, weeks away from his 105th birthday, was still working; Leonard had recently gone to the
sesshin
he led in New Mexico. It was as tough as it had ever been. Tougher, in fact. “Roshi has ratcheted up his schedule a few degrees,” Leonard said, the smile on his face indicating that he was not displeased with this adjustment. “He's at the top of his game; it's like he's digging in. All the monks feel it and they're making the most of him.” With customary modesty, Leonard shrugged off any mention that much the same might be said about him, despite having followed the most successful tour of his career with what was starting to look like his most successful album.
Old Ideas
debuted in the Top 5 of the charts in twenty-six countries, reaching the No. 1 spot in seventeen of them, including the UK and Canada, and topping
Billboard's
folk chart in the U.S.

Leonard had been asked at the press conferences whether he was going to tour. He answered ambiguously that he planned to tour but that he had no touring plans. Meanwhile, negotiations were under way for another very lengthy tour, which Leonard remained very keen to do. But it was complicated. Given Roshi's age, Leonard was loath to commit to spending lengthy periods a long way away from him. He did not say so because it would have been ungracious, and he knew what the old man's reaction would have been. Back when they sat drinking cognac in Roshi's cabin on Mount Baldy, Roshi, then in his midnineties, would apologize to Leonard for not having died; Leonard had moved to the Zen Center when Roshi was eighty-seven, wanting to spend time with the old man while he still could. Instead, Leonard reasoned that, rather than go back on the road and enjoy himself, he should follow Roshi's lead and ratchet up his schedule, and dig in and do his work, saying, “One does have a sense that this is not going to last forever, that one's health is going to become more of a consideration at a certain point, so I would like to bring as many things to completion as possible.”
21
Leonard had begun a new album.

Epilogue

I
t is beautiful winter's day in Los Angeles. Leonard suggests we make the most of it and sit outside. Since the sun is losing the battle against the nip in the air, he urges me to wrap up and invites me to borrow a hat. There are four on the hall stand: two crushed caps and two fedoras besides the one he has on his head. He is dressed almost exactly as he was in the
Old Ideas
sleeve photo, except that his tie is straight and the top of his shirt is buttoned. On his wrist he wears a cheap metal bracelet, the kind they sell in Mexican stores: twelve tiny cameos of Jesus, Mary and the saints strung together with elastic. He is slight as a jockey and lean as a runner, and has more than a touch of Fred Astaire. That slight stoop he'd had since he was a young man, as if deep inside he felt himself much taller than he was, appears to have vanished, along with whatever else had been weighing him down.

The brightest, most sheltered spot is the balcony, which is off his bedroom. It is a small balcony, just big enough for two chairs, a little table and a plant in a terra-cotta pot. It overlooks a small neat garden with two grapefruit trees, one sun lounger, and two dogs—Lorca's—that are padding idly about the lawn. Beyond them is the garage-turned-studio where Leonard is working on his new album. He is already four or five songs into it. It's remarkable, I say, that little more than a year ago he was still on the last leg of the tour. “Was it really just a year ago?” he asks. His face has one of those smiles little boys make when they're caught doing something they shouldn't, but of which they are secretly rather proud. “I don't know if it's a function of the imminent departure, or just a habit of work, or having very few distractions now. Before the tour, I was very busy with trying to sort out my economic and my legal life, and once the tour started I got back into the mode that I'm very familiar with, and which I like, which is working and writing. And I would like to finish my work. You don't feel like wasting too much time at a certain point.”

Time speeds up, they say, the closer it gets to the end of the reel. “It is odd,” Leonard says. “There are metaphysicians who tell me that time actually has collapsed. Although I don't understand the mechanism and I think they may be putting me on, it certainly feels that way.” Is there one piece of work that he is dying to finish, I ask, before noticing the morbid choice of word. “Oh, please,” Leonard says, smiling, “do get morbid. There's that [nameless] song I'd like to complete that bothers me a lot, and I would really like to have it on the next record. But I've felt that for the past two or three records, maybe four.” He doesn't think too much about the future, he says, other than looking forward to the promise he made himself to take up smoking again on his eightieth birthday. He thinks, or hopes, he will be touring when he's eighty and is looking forward to the prospect of sneaking outside the bus for a quiet cigarette. One thing he does know is that he has “no sense of or appetite for retirement.”

A leaf-blower starts up in a garden down the street. It almost drowns out Leonard's voice, which is already soft—softer still when he is asked to talk about himself. There were times as I tried to retrace his life, I tell him, when he wore me out with all his worrying and hard work—times when I wanted to say to him, “For heaven's sake, what are you doing? What is it that you want?” “Right, right,” he says, nodding sympathetically. “But this conversation for me is part of another world because I'm not in it anymore. I have little or no interest in any of these matters. I never talk about them to myself.” He is not, he says, much of a self-examiner. “I suppose it's violating some Socratic imperative to know thyself, if that's who it was, but I've always found that examination extremely tedious. Sometimes elements of my life arise and an invitation to experience something that is not mundane arises, but in terms of a deliberate investigation of my life to untangle it or sort it out or understand it, those occasions rarely if ever arise. I don't find it compelling at all.”

What is going through his mind right now is a song. “One of my mother's favorite records was ‘The Donkey Serenade.' Have you heard the song?” He sings, “
There's a song in the air, yet the fair senorita, doesn't seem to care, for the song in the air.
” “My mother seemed to love that song,” he says. “I think she was learning a dance step to go with it. The dance teacher would come to the house—it's very touching—and she did this step. I saw the diagram once. It looked like a square.” Leonard gets up out of the chair. In a neat little square of sunlight, against the backdrop of a solid blue sky, quietly humming the melody, he dances alone the dance of “The Donkey Serenade.”

    
 

    
Coming to the

    
end of the

    
book

    
but not

    
quite yet

    
maybe when

    
we reach

    
the bottom
1

Author's Note

T
he sun was starting to set, so we moved indoors to the kitchen, where Leonard set about plying me solicitously with food and drink: tea, cognac, wine, a hot dog, perhaps some scrambled eggs? We finally shook on lattes, which he served in two of the coffee mugs his record company made some twenty years before to promote his album
The Future
. While we sat drinking at the small kitchen table, which was pushed up against the wall, by an open window through which a cool breeze blew, he asked how things were going with the book—a book, I should add, that he did not ask me to write and did not ask to read, neither of which appeared to inhibit his support. He was just making conversation, really. I gathered his only interest in the book was that it wouldn't be a hagiography and that its author shouldn't starve to death, at least not on his watch. “Think about this seriously before you answer,” he said in that solemn voice. “Would you like a scoop of ice cream in your coffee?”

To write a biography, particularly of a someone still living, is to immerse yourself in that person's life to a degree that would probably get you locked up in any decent society. Without the tolerance, trust, candor, generosity and good humor of Leonard Cohen, this book would not be what it is. The same can be said for his manager, Robert Kory. I am deeply grateful to them both. I also owe a great debt to the more than one hundred people—friends, family, associates, musicians, muses, writers, record producers, publishers, lovers, rabbis and monks—who kindly granted me interviews. Their names—some well known, others people who were speaking to a biographer for the first time—can be found at the head of every chapter to which their stories and insights contribute.

Several went way beyond the call of duty and offered, along with ongoing encouragement, access to their personal archives, letters, diaries, address books and photographs. Special thanks to Marianne Ihlen, Aviva Layton, Rebecca De Mornay, Suzanne Elrod, Julie Christensen, Perla Batalla, Anjani Thomas, Judy Collins, Steve Sanfield, Roscoe Beck, Bob Johnston, Chris Darrow, Dan Kessel and Steve Sanfield; to Thelma Blitz for her diaries and contacts; to Ron Cornelius for copies of the journals and short stories he wrote while touring with Leonard; to Ian Milne for playing me the rare reel-to-reel recording he made of one of Leonard's mental hospital concerts; and to Henry Zemel for the CD he made for me from an even earlier reel-to-reel recording of Leonard and his friend playing music in the midsixties.

Biographies also have a lot in common with detective stories, the lack of corpse aside. An enormous amount of time is spent on footwork, knocking on doors, looking for fresh information, double- and triple-checking that information, establishing motives and checking alibis. Since Leonard moved around so much—geographically, spiritually, in all sorts of ways—it made for an enviable air-mile balance, but also presented challenges. I was extremely lucky to have found so many people around the world who were ready and able to help. In Montreal, my thanks to Rabbi Shuchat and Penni Kolb at Shaar Hashomayim; Honora Shaughnessy at the McGill Alumni Association; Leonard's cousin, the late David Cohen; Mort Rosengarten; Arnold Steinberg; Erica Pomerance; Penny Lang; Suzanne Verdal; Phil Cohen; Jack Locke; Janet Davis; Dean Davis; Sue Sullivan; Rona Feldman; Melvin Heft; Malka Marom; Gavin Ross; and journalist Juan Rodriguez, who generously handed over his Leonard Cohen newspaper archive. In Toronto: Greig Dymond, who unearthed a mighty stash of Leonard Cohen interviews from the CBC archives; Steve Brewer, president of the Westmount High Alumni, for his copy of the school's 1951 yearbook (Leonard's graduation year); Dennis Lee; and at Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library Jennifer Toews and the late Richard Landon, who were an enormous help in negotiating a path through the mountain of file boxes that constitute the University of Toronto's Leonard Cohen archives.

In California I am very grateful to writer-producer Harvey Kubernik, who generously offered memories, contacts and old interviews; to photographer Joel Bernstein, who shared his stories and pictures; to Robert Faggen, who took time away from writing his Ken Kesey biography to lead me (via a shooting gallery, where he showed me how to use a handgun) to the monastery on Mount Baldy; to Andy Lesko, Arlett Vereecke and Colleen Browne, who between them kept me sane; and to my interviewees Ronee Blakely, David Crosby, Hal Blaine, Rufus Wainwright, Jackson Browne, Rabbi Mordecai Finley, monks Daijo and Kigen, Jac Holzman, Sharon Robinson, Sharon Weisz, Larry Cohen, Paul Body, Sean Dixon, Peter Marshall, Chris Darrow, Chester Crill, David Kessel and David Lindley. (Biographers always lament the ones who got away, and I was sad not to have added Joni Mitchell, Jennifer Warnes and Phil Spector to this list. I tried. )

In New York I had the excellent company and assistance of Randy Haecker at Sony Legacy; Tom Tierney, director of the Sony Music Archives Library—their artist's cards from Columbia Studio gave invaluable clues to the recording of Leonard's first seven albums; Danny Fields; Dick and Linda Straub; my East Coast interviewees John Simon, John Lissauer, Hal Willner, Bob Fass, Terese Coe, Liberty, Larry Cohen, Harry “Ratso” Sloman and Philip Glass; and my manager, rock and longtime friend Steven Saporta. In Nashville, I was grateful for the help of John Lomax III, Charlie Daniels, Kris Kristofferson and Christian Oliver, and in various other U.S. cities not yet mentioned, of interviewees Leanne Ungar, Black Francis, John Bilezikjian and Murray Lerner.

In the UK and Europe I was blessed with the assistance of Helen Donlon, friend, researcher and book editor, who tracked down the people whose interviews helped me fill the gaps in Leonard's early days on Hydra, and in London and New York: Barry Miles, Richard Vick, Terry Oldfield, Jeff Baxter, Ben Olins, Don Wreford and George and Angelika Lialios. Thanks also to Kevin Howlett at the BBC, Richard Wootton, Kari Hesthamar, and to Tony Palmer, Joe Boyd, Tom Maschler, Rob Hallett, Ratnesh Mathur and Charley and Hattie Webb for the interviews.

They say you can judge a man's character by the company he keeps, and the same might apply to a musician's fans. I've been around a lot of fans in my many years writing about musicians, but there are few as erudite and informed as Leonard's or as generous with their expertise. A round of applause for my unofficial international team of Cohenologists, who were always there to answer the stickiest questions and pull rare acetates out of hats: Jarkko Arjatsalo, founder and overseer of LeonardCohenFiles.com—Leonard calls him “the General Secretary of the party”—to whose website Leonard contributes; Allan Showalter, psychiatrist, wit and webmaster of 1heckofaguy.com, a site Leonard is known to frequent; Tom Sakic of LeonardCohenCroatia.com; Marie Mazur of Speaking Cohen; writer John Etherington; Hebrew scholar Doron B. Cohen; and Jim Devlin, author of three books on Leonard Cohen, though that did not stop him from helping me with mine.

I was also helped by a great many music journalists, who from start to finish stepped up at all the right moments with clippings, alcohol, commiseration and words of advice. A couple volunteered, without me being forced to use my new shotgun skills, to read and critique the entire book in draft form. Another leapt in to help with an eleventh-hour subedit. Yes I'm biased, I love music journalists, and I fully intend to go back to being one soon (in tandem, of course, with my illustrious career as a ukulele-playing singer-songwriter, performing to crowds that on a good day you can count on two hands). I would like to salute, for their various services rendered, Phil Sutcliffe, Johnny Black, Fred Dellar, Peter Silverton, Joe Nick Patoski, Lucy O'Brien, Paul Trynka, Rob O'Connor, Jonathan Cott, Fred de Vries and Phil Alexander and all at the world's best music magazine,
MOJO
, reserving a very special thanks to Brian Cullman, Michael Simmons and Neil Spencer.

Thanks to my agent, Sarah Lazin; her assistant, Manuela Jessel; and the unflappable Julian Alexander in the UK. My book has three different English-language publishers—Ecco in the U.S., McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Jonathan Cape in the UK—and it could not have found better homes. I count myself extremely fortunate to have as my publisher and lead editor Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape in London. I'm deeply grateful to Dan and to his assistant, Steven Messer, for their care and support and all their hard work. My sincere thanks and appreciation also to Daniel Halpern and Libby Edelson at Ecco and Ellen Seligman at McClelland—and a hearty round of applause to all the tireless copyeditors and proofreaders.

Most of all, thank you, Leonard Cohen, for being so considerate as to choose the second I hit puberty to release your first album, for continuing to move and enlighten me with your music and words ever since, for permitting me to out you as a ukulele player, and for living a remarkable life that has run me ragged these past few years. What can I say; it was a swell party. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go empty the ashtrays and take the bottles out. I hear you're heading back on the road any day now. Good. We need you out there. Hope to see you somewhere along the way.

 

Sylvie Simmons

San Francisco, 2012